Welcome to Algorithms at Work

Workshop to be held at CSCW’16, San Francisco, February 27 – March 2, 2016.

Computational algorithms have recently emerged as the subject of fervent public and academic debates. What animates many of these debates is a perceived lack of clarity as to what algorithms actually are, what precisely they do, and which human-technology-relations their application may bring about.

Therefore, this CSCW workshop critically discusses computational algorithms and the diverse ways in which humans relate to them—focusing particularly upon work practices and investigating how algorithms facilitate, regulate, and require human labor, as well as how humans make sense of and react to them.

The purpose of this workshop is threefold: first, to chart the diversity of algorithmic technologies as well as their application, appropriation, use and presence in work practices; second, to probe analytic vocabularies that account for empirical diversity; third, to discuss implications for design that come out of our understandings of algorithms and the technologies through which they are enacted.